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Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Veeam now delivers Hyper-Availability for all applications and data running on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), with Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV.

Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV enables you to experience frequent, fast backups from Nutanix AHV snapshots, with even faster recoveries of entire VMs, individual files and application items to keep your business online, all the time.

Monday, May 28, 2018

Nutanix Beam is a multi-cloud optimization service delivered as part of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS. Beam provides organizations with deep visibility and rich analytics detailing cloud consumption patterns, along with one-click cost optimization across their cloud environments.

·Cloud Cost Analytics & Optimization

Beam tracks cost consumption across all cloud resources at both aggregate and granular levels - per application workload, team and business unit. Beam identifies underutilized and unused cloud services and provides one-click remediation, empowering operators to realize cloud cost savings immediately and set policies to continuously maintain high levels of cloud efficiency.

·Centralized Cloud Cost Governance

Beam visualizes resources by groups and departments, empowering cloud operators to manage their usage. Beam provides policy-based reporting and chargeback so that teams can ensure consumption is within budget and aligns with business objectives.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Nutanix AOS 5.6 brings forth Virtual Infrastructure Management capabilities via the RESTful V3 APIs. These APIs are built on an Intentful model and are limited to Prism Central. They will allow customers to deliver a self-service portal functionality to their IT organizations along with many other features such as microsegmentation.

Scale Out Prism Central

Previously, a Prism Central instance was limited to a single VM. You can now expand (scale out) a Prism Central instance to three VMs (also known as nodes), to increase the capacity and resiliency of Prism Central. Scale out Prism Central is supported on AHV or ESXi clusters only. It is not supported on Hyper-V.

Microsegmentation

A part of the Nutanix Flow offering, is now generally available in AOS 5.6. Prism Central enables you to create security policies that protect all traffic to and from a VM through a stateful firewall running inside each AHV host. A security policy definition includes the category of VMs that you want to protect, a whitelist for inbound traffic, a whitelist for outbound traffic, and the protocol and ports that can be used in the inbound and outbound directions.

You can also block communication between two categories of VMs by configuring an isolation environment policy, and you can quarantine a VM, optionally subject it to forensic examination, and then release it from the quarantine when it is safe to do so.

Categories Support in Prism Central (GA)

Prism Central now supports the creation and assignment of categories. A category is a grouping of entities into a key value pair. Typically, new entities are assigned to a category based on some criteria. Policies can then be tied to those entities that are assigned (grouped by) a specific category value.

Two-node Cluster

A traditional Nutanix cluster requires a minimum of three nodes, but Nutanix now offers the option of a two-node cluster for ROBO implementations and other situations that require a lower cost yet high resiliency option. A two-node cluster can still provide many of the resiliency features of a three-node cluster by adding an external Witness VM in a separate failure domain to the configuration.

Witness VM is now Built Independently from AOS

Starting with release 5.6, the Witness VM image is built independently from AOS. This new Witness VM can support both Metro Availability and two-node clusters.

Support 80 Terabytes Storage (10 x 8 TB) Per Node

AOS and AHV now support up to 80 TB of storage per node. Use cases for this storage capacity include Acropolis File Services, back up, and cluster capacity expansion. This feature is available on NX-6155-G5 platforms.

Load Balancing vDisks

AHV hosts now support the load balancing of vDisks in a volume group for user VMs. Load balancing of vDisks in a volume group enables IO-intensive VMs to utilize resources such as the CPU and memory of multiple Controller VMs (CVMs). vDisks belonging to a volume group are distributed across the CVMs in a cluster, helping to improve performance and prevent bottlenecks. However, each vDisk still utilizes the resources of a single CVM.

Guest VM-initiated Power Operations

You can initiate safe and graceful power operations such as soft shutdown and restart of the VMs running on AHV hosts by using the aCLI. The soft shutdown and restart operations are initiated and performed by Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) within the VM, helping to ensure a safe and graceful VM shutdown or restart. You can create a pre-shutdown script that you can choose to run before a shutdown or restart of the VM. In the pre-shutdown script, include any tasks or checks that you want to run before a VM is shut down or restarted.

You can choose to abort the power operation if the pre-shutdown script fails. If the script fails, an alert (guest_agent_alert) is generated in the Prism web console

AOS improvements to align with the RHEL 7 STIG

Nutanix has implemented security rules checks in the Controller VM to support compliance with the Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) STIG, as published by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

Nutanix clusters now generate an SNMP trap named ntxTrapResolved when an alert is resolved either manually or automatically. The resolved trap contains existing and new MIB objects, including an alert UUID object that enables you to determine which alert condition was resolved.

NOTICE: 5.6 is a new AOS Feature Release, which is not Long Term Supported (LTS). If you upgrade to this version, the support will only be for 6 months after the Release Date, within which period you will have to upgrade to the next feature release. If you are interested only in bug fixes and not new features, please do not upgrade to this release. The next LTS Maintenance Release, 5.5.2 is expected to be released in April 2018.

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Nutanix has been recognized by Gartner as a Leader in 2018 inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Systems.

Nutanix believes its placement in the Leaders quadrant is a strong validation of its leadership in the market it pioneered and in its vision to become the next generation operating system for the enterprise cloud.

Nutanix Calm

Nutanix Calm allows you to seamlessly select, provision, and manage your business applications across your infrastructure for both the private and public clouds. Nutanix Calm provides App lifecycle, monitoring and remediation to manage your heterogeneous infrastructure, for example, VMs or bare-metal servers. Nutanix Calm supports multiple platforms so that you can use the single self-service and automation interface to manage all your infrastructure. Nutanix Calm provides an interactive and user friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) to manage your infrastructure. You can access the Nutanix Calm feature from the Prism Central.
Nutanix Calm Features:

Application Lifecycle Management: Automates the provision and deletion of both traditional multi-tiered applications and modern distributed services by using pre-integrated blueprints that make management of applications simple in both private (AHV) and public cloud (AWS).

Customizable Blueprints: Simplifies the setup and management of custom enterprise applications by incorporating the elements of each app, including relevant VMs, configurations and related binaries into an easy-to-use blueprint that can be managed by the infrastructure team.

Nutanix Marketplace: Publishes the application blueprints directly to the end users through Marketplace.

Governance: Maintains control with role-based governance thereby limiting the user operations that are based on the permissions.

Hybrid Cloud Management: Automates the provisioning of a hybrid cloud architecture, scaling both multi-tiered and distributed applications across cloud environments, including AWS.

Machine Learning Engine

Prism Central now includes machine-learning capabilities that analyze resource usage over time and provide tools to monitor resource consumption, identify abnormal behavior, and guide resource planning.
Machine Learning Engine include:
· VM "right sizing" where VMs are analyzed and those that exhibit inefficient profiles are identified
· Anomaly detection to record when performance or resource usage is outside an expected range based on learned VM baseline behavior.
· "Smart" alerts that trigger when specified anomalies are recorded.
· Reports that summarize cluster efficiency.

Self-Service Portal Integration into Prism Central

The Prism Self Service feature allows you to create projects where consumers of IT infrastructure within an enterprise—individual users or teams such as development, test, and DevOps—can provision and manage VMs in a self-service manner, without having to engage IT in day-to-day operations. Now you can manage the full range of self-service portal features from the Prism Central web console user interface.

Reports Management

The report management feature provides you with an ability to configure and deliver the historical reports containing information about the infrastructure resources. This feature provides the operational insights of your infrastructure into your mailbox according to the schedule that you have configured.
A generated report can be divided into three main components:

Style: Defines the way to represent the report, for example background color, logos, and so on.

Representation of data: Defines the way that you want to represent the data. You can accomplish this by including different views (pre-defined and customizable).

Support for Windows Server 2016 and Hyper-V 2016

Network Segmentation

Network segmentation in an AHV cluster is a security feature that separates management traffic from backplane traffic by creating separate virtual networks, one for each of these traffic types, on the default external virtual switch on each host. To enable the CVMs in a cluster to communicate over these networks, the CVMs are multihomed by the addition of a third virtual network interface card (vNIC) to the Controller VM. Additionally, the hypervisor is assigned an interface on the backplane network.

Single Node Cluster

Support for single node clusters running user VMs. Single Node clusters are fully supported with NX-1175S-G5. Limited user VM use is supported on NX-1155-G5 depending on the compute available and which only supports AHV.

Async Disaster Recovery with NearSync

The NearSync feature provides you with the ability to protect your data with up to 1 minute RPO. NearSync secure your data with minimal data loss in case of a disaster and provides you with more granular control during the restore process. The NearSync feature allows resolution to a disaster event in minutes.

AHV Turbo Data Path

AHV Turbo replaces the QEMU SCSI data path in the AHV architecture for improved storage performance.
Support for vNUMA
vNUMA optimizes memory performance of virtual machines that require more vCPUs or memory than the capacity of a single physical NUMA node. In a vNUMA topology, you can create multiple vNUMA nodes where each vNUMA node includes vCPUs and virtual RAM. When you assign a vNUMA node to a physical NUMA node, the vCPUs can intelligently determine the memory latency (high or low). Low memory latency within a vNUMA node results in low latency within a physical NUMA node.
AHV hosts support Virtual Non-uniform Memory Access (vNUMA) on virtual machines. You can enable vNUMA on VMs when you create or modify the VMs to optimize memory performance.

Updated Controller VM Kernel

Support for OpenLDAP for Self-Service Portal

Nutanix now supports the OpenLDAP directory service running on CentOS distributions.

Acropolis Image Create / Update / Delete (CUD)

Acropolis Image create, update, delete (CUD) behavior has changed in this release. Image API CUD behavior depends on whether a cluster (also known as Prism Element) is registered to Prism Central.
If the Prism Element (PE) cluster is newly created and has never been registered with a Prism Central instance (that is, never managed by Prism Central), all image CUD operations will be allowed on the PE cluster.
If the PE cluster is registered with a Prism Central instance (that is, managed by Prism Central) CUD operations will be blocked on the PE cluster. Ownership of images is migrated from PE to Prism Central. CUD operations must be performed through Prism Central.
If the PE cluster is unregistered from Prism Central, new images can be created, updated and deleted on the PE clusters. Update operations are blocked on the PE cluster for images that previously migrated to Prism Central.
In the case of a local image local file upload, with more than one PE cluster managed by Prism Central, the image state is active on that PE cluster. All other PE clusters will show the image as inactive. If you create a VM from that image, the image bits are copied to the other PE clusters. The image then appears in an active state on all managed PE clusters.

Connect to Citrix Cloud

The Connect to Citrix Cloud feature leverages the automated installer functionality of the Citrix Cloud connector to establish a secure communication channel between Nutanix and Citrix Cloud. This feature provides single-click integration of the on-premise Nutanix clusters (as a resource location) with the Citrix Cloud environment.

Monday, November 13, 2017

I was lucky enough to attend Nutanix .Next Europe 2017 in Nice, France. Really, it went beyond my expectations as a technology conference. Starting with the name of the venue “Acropolis Conference Center”, Opening Keynote with more than 2,200+ Cloud Builders, Recognizing of NutanixNTC, Live Demo by Steven Poitras (Writer of The Nutanix Bible) followed by very inspirational presentation by Fabien Cousteau & Rob Lloyd (CEO Hyperloop One), Ending with an remarkable closing keynote by Mick Ebeling “Founder NOT IMPOSSIBLE”.

Also, witness the passion for the technology & innovation between all attendees, including Nutanix Top Management, Staff, Sponsors and Customers.

Moreover, it was a good opportunity to hear all the latest announcements including “Acropolis Object Storage Service, Nutanix Calm & XI Cloud Services” and upcoming features in AHV 5.5 (e.g. Support for vGPU & Citrix PVS)

Friday, June 30, 2017

Nutanix X-Ray is an automated testing framework and benchmarking application for enterprise grade datacenters. With X-Ray, teams can simulate how applications are impacted during common events and scenarios, including system failures, spikes in application use, software upgrades, and more. Run multiple workloads in the same environment, while ensuring that heavy demand of one application does not negatively impact performance for other workloads.

The following areas are covered in the X-Ray test scenarios:

Availability X-Ray tests how a hyperconverged solution tolerates a node failure during a workload. Consistent performance and stability test the system's availability and the management fabric's failure tolerance.

Realistic Performance X-Ray tests the system's solution to handle mixed workloads. The solution can include running databases on a single node, simultaneously running VDI workloads on multiple nodes, mixing VM snapshot, VDI boot storms, VM provisioning, and multiple workloads or stability over an extended period of time.

Feature Set Ideal features include clones for VM provisioning, deduplication, compression, VAAI support, native VMlevel replication, Cloud Connect, 1-click software and hypervisor upgrades, BIOS/drives, compatibility with multiple hypervisors and the ability to migrate and convert between hypervisors with the same solution.

Data Integrity X-Ray tests the data's safety during power outages or component failures.